I love gmplanet

April 26, 2008

When Robin Monk’s Game Maker news aggregator service, gmplanet, was first released I was skeptical at the effect it would have on content producing Game Maker websites. I also feared that GameMaker.info, a customisable Game Maker startpage which I was a big fan of, would be damaged.

A month after the launch of gmplanet clickthroughs from GameMaker.info had declined at planet still lagged far below gamemaker.info in popularity.

In the past month gmplanet has sent just 10% of the number of visits that gamemaker.info has sent our way, but I love it!

The RSS feed that gmplanet provides makes it easy to check the latest Game Maker related news (and some stuff that isn’t Game Maker related and probably shouldn’t be in there) in one place. I have the RSS feed installed on my iGoogle homepage.

The only criticisms I have is that the RSS is sometimes delayed in updating – meaning that despite a hard refresh [ctrl + f5] the feed still sometimes lags behind gmplanet.org. The only other issue is that sometimes news articles of the same story clog up the feed as seen in this screenshot below (taken a while back).

Yeah, google does take a LONG time to ping our feed, but we are still a bit behind. GMplanet updates ALL sites within 1hr5m, Popular sites within 40m, with most of the time the new content appearing within 15m.
This is done to keep from overwhelming sites that only post once or twice a week, where checking every 5 minutes would result in around two thousand requests a week, and a whopping 43MB (using GMblog RSS feed size as a guide) of transfer. So, we use various bits of logic to only make requests when absolutely needed.